How to use Kiva to get thousands of free air miles OR how to easily earn 9.95% on your savings

Isn’t it amazing what people can figure out?

Here I’ve been playing around with Kiva since 2008 and I’m only just finding out about a pretty amazing strategy to build yourself a ton of air miles to get free flights apart from, of course, the airport tax. Or, conversely, how you might earn up to 10% (or more!) on your money!

Now, personally I don’t have to use this strategy as our company has so many expenses every month that we run through the company credit cards that we build up enough air miles each year that my wife and I have been able to take an international vacation trip every year since 2015.

But, let’s get back to the story at hand…. how do people use their Kiva account to build air miles.

It’s fairly simple actually. Here are the steps:

1. Add credit to your Kiva account from PayPal using the credit card that gives you air miles.
2. Select someone on the Kiva platform to whom you can loan the money to.
3. Select the “Bring Hope to the World” team to associate your loan with [this is optional but we would love it if you did :)]
4. Wait four to six months (most loans, some take longer) for your money to be repaid.
5. Withdraw the funds to your bank account & pay off the credit card
6. Start again at Step # 1.

Usually when you use your credit card to get air miles you’re buying stuff… food, clothes, gas, furniture…. all sorts of stuff. But, that money is gone. You don’t get it back.

With this Kiva strategy, you’re actually getting the money back and you can keep rolling it around between your Kiva account, your bank account and your credit card account all the while building air miles.

It would be even better if you had some money lying around in a savings account. Let’s say $5,000.

So, here’s a modified version to take away interest cost on the credit card balance:

1. Add $5,000 to your Kiva account using PayPal & your air miles credit card
2. Pay off the credit card with the $5,000 from your savings account
3. Select someone on the Kiva platform to whom you can loan the money to.
4. Select “Bring Hope to the World” team to associate your loan with
5. Wait four to six months for your money to be repaid
6. Withdraw the funds to your savings account as the funds are repaid
7. Once your savings account is back up to $5,000, start again at Step 1.

There is of course no real limit. You could do this with $100,000 if you want to build your air miles balance faster. Kiva only allows a $10,000 maximum credit at any one time so you’ll just have to do ten transfers to get the $100,000 into the account. Other than that it should work the same way.

It is a good idea to donate a small percentage of your loans to Kiva to help fund their operations. I work on about 1% of the total loan value but you can decide for yourself what you would like to do. Kiva suggests amounts to you but you can modify those to be either zero or whatever you feel comfortable with.

Isn’t that cool? You get to help people that really need access to small loans for their little businesses so you’re doing good. And, while you’re doing good you get to build yourself an air miles balance without really spending any money! With about 80,000 miles you can take an international flight to Europe or many other regions. I just did a quick check on the United Airlines website and a return trip from Houston to London is $2,410.

Okay… let’s say you want to fly to London for free for your next annual vacation… what are the numbers you have to hit?

• If you loaned out $22,000 on Kiva in month 1
• using loans with an average loan repayment of four months
• you’d receive back around $5,500 per month for the remaining 11 months
• that would pay off your credit card (and/or refund your savings account if you’re including that in the strategy)
• as you’re repaid, you need to lend the $5,500 out again
• Your total credit card charges would be: $22,000 + (11 x $5,500) = $82,500
• So, just over the 80,000 miles you need for an international ticket

So, let’s work out the return on your money on this trip to London you want to take next year.

Instead of having money lying around in your savings account earning almost no interest, you can instead build up your air miles with this Kiva strategy and get a $2,410 flight for free. Okay, maybe not 100% for free… let’s assume you donated 1% of the $22,000 to Kiva’s operations – that’s $220. That means your benefit is only $2,190. You’re using $22,000 for the strategy. That results in a 9.95% return!!! With almost no risk!!! The $220 is tax deductible as well as you’re donating to a 501(c)3 charity so the actual return will most likely be over 10% when all is said & done.

Now that’s what I call a win-win! Let us know in the comments what you think of this idea.

And, don’t forget to join our team! https://www.kiva.org/team/bring_hope_to_the_world